


The Spirit of Muskoka

by innie



Category: Blue Castle - L. M. Montgomery
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-12
Updated: 2019-07-12
Packaged: 2020-06-27 05:37:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,446
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19784338
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/innie/pseuds/innie
Summary: "And we must see about that picture by Tierney, after all."





	The Spirit of Muskoka

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tablelamp](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tablelamp/gifts).



> This book has long been a compulsively rereadable favorite for me, and I was glad to be able to play with it here. This is the one scene I always thought was missing from the epilogue.

It was an unaccustomed feeling, jealousy. He wasn't used to envying another man the use of his eyes, or being reduced to wondering what it might be like to level an artist's gaze at his wife. He was an artist himself, even if his medium was words rather than pigment; Valancy averred that the thoughts he expressed with such simplicity and clarity had saved her life. None of Allan Tierney's daubs could match that.

Barney sighed. It wasn't that jealousy was so unknown to him, really. He'd used to be eaten up by it when his heart had been fixed on Ethel Traverse's golden locks and skin of the richest cream, knowing every man in her vicinity desired the one he loved. And he couldn't truly envy Allan Tierney, the living exemplar of what he'd once thought himself to be: a crabbed old bachelor, disappointed less by life's vagaries than by others' disinclination to fit the roles he assigned them.

What was truly unexpected — what he had no context for — was this feeling surging through him. What made it even more extraordinary was that he looked at his wife and saw the same emotion radiating from her, shining out like candlelight from her shadowy eyes: love triumphant. 

Still, he thought with mordant amusement at his own fussing, it was splendid to be able to gaze upon Valancy, his whole heart surely in his eyes, and not have her duck away, pink-cheeked and shy. She couldn't, not with Allan Tierney's knowing, formidable, arresting gaze locked on her, drinking her up and letting his hand spill, with the tenderest care, the sweetness of her onto the canvas in front of him.

Valancy was wearing the pale green sweater she favoured for their rambles, the colour bringing out the delicate tracery, alluring as the evanescent geometry of snowflakes, of jade veins threading through her moonlight skin. She had a cat's eyes, glowing like darkest amber in her fine-boned face. The shy smile she cast back over her shoulder was mostly in the gems of her eyes, and just enough to draw soft and kissable lines at the corners of her mouth. Barney could see exactly why Allan Tierney had been driven mad, why he had cajoled, what had prompted him to say, earnestly pleading, that he could paint nothing else until he had exorcised the Spirit of Muskoka from his whole soul.

But that look wasn't for Allan Tierney. It was for _him_.

There was no getting around it: his wife was a beauty. But there was so much that Tierney couldn't capture, that she had chosen him — of all people, though he'd run away and taken an altered name to hide behind — to know, trusting that he would match her, bravery for strength. Her willingness to lay herself open to ideas and impressions that her clan had tried to make her fear was something he honoured as much as cherished; she sunned herself on the rocks like a frolicking mermaid, went to distant lands and heard their bells by drinking in books, and came to their cosy bed seeking comfort and joy. The glints of humour, betokening a sharp intelligence and a sense of the ridiculous that charmed and pleased him, the easy way she caught and amplified his words, turning them mysterious again when she pitched them back — all were newly and wholly bewitching to him when housed in the body of this woodland sprite. And her voice, that warm tone that was entirely hers, soothing as the buzz of industrious hives of bees at work in a field of wildflowers — no one else in the world had a laugh like hers, that wine-dark and bubbly expression of mirth that would have been enough to break any spell, had he indeed been enchanted by a malevolent force not of his own making.

All of this was his for the taking, and he smiled victoriously. Valancy caught the flavour of his expression and waited until Tierney turned his head to load his brush with more pigment to make her gaze chiding, to rewrite her smile as a frown that told him quite clearly she was as prepared to be an outlaw as he; she could step down from her muse's pose without a care, and almost he wished she would, just so he could fold her in his arms again. None of those embers of rebellion would appear in the portrait, Barney was certain, but then her mask alone was very well worth capturing. Tierney himself had been bowled over, and the very fact that his was the artistic hand meant that others who had never dreamt of counting Valancy Stirling — herself included — as a beauty would allow the master to shape their taste.

Allan Tierney wasn't just reproducing her as a looking glass might, of course; he'd never have agreed to this session if that were the extent of the man's powers. All of his own words, written in the long hollow his life had been before Valancy asked him to marry her — she'd found the words before he had, there were brains behind her beauty — seemed shallow and foolish once she'd illuminated every corner of his existence, but he did remember spouting off pompously about an artist's responsibility. _The artist must push himself to work beyond his technical skills,_ he had written, safe in his little lean-to but fancying himself able to feel yet the stinging kiss of winter on his cheek. _He ought to strive to not just present his subject as it is, but to translate it, decipher it even, to lay bare its fundamental workings for his audience as well as, finally, himself. In that way, and only in that way, would he feel satisfied that he had captured his subject and done it justice._

Thinking back on the piffle he had foisted upon a defenceless bevy of readers in John Foster's name, he marvelled that Valancy had found use in the texts. Perhaps the artist's intentions mattered less than the audience's, if she could make a life-saving device out of words that he had poured onto the page in a spirit of bitterness, preaching about fearlessness when he'd turned tail and run to hide his own too-thin skin. The thought intrigued him, and he found himself looking at Valancy with new eyes.

Whether Allan Tierney could even see, let alone translate, all of her facets was suddenly close to immaterial; Tierney had bargained for Valancy's face and form, and he would have them to the letter and not a jot more. What Valancy would make of being made art — _that_ was the question Barney posed without knowing how she might answer. He looked at her again, watching her marble immobility change into a more plastic stillnes, like a doe ready to pick dainty footsteps through a clearing, pausing only to scent the air.

Between one breath and the next, there was a shift — her breathing quickened, her skin flushed the palest rose, and her eyes gleamed in a way he'd not seen before. They met his and the lines of her smile deepened the merest fraction. It was enough, and fitting, that his body knew the truth before his mind did, when all of her signals were given by the same instrument. This proclamation was not for Allan Tierney, so engaged in capturing every one of her lovely details that he missed the animating spirit behind them. The declaration was in a language only the two of them knew, the argot of their Blue Castle.

Their store of love was growing, pushing past all bounds that he had once thought inviolable. They would have a child with whom to share the world. He understood without needing reassurance, but he sought it regardless, eyebrows inquisitively up, heart pounding like a celebratory drum when she nodded primly, unwilling to break her pose. He wondered who else would know once the portrait was unveiled, grinning when he remembered his father had blustered his way into an extravagant price for the piece. If Dad figured it out, Barney would say nothing about the bumper crop of gifts the child would receive, filling every corner of their Mistawis shack. And he might even write again, for his wife and child, stories truer than he'd dared to pen before, when he'd shut himself up in his lean-to and closed out the world he'd explored without joy.

For he had a house that she'd made a home, and they could live and work together, expanding their shared language for a third, a very welcome third. Art's best use was to better life, after all, and Valancy was a master.


End file.
